Christmas Slab Pie, Part 2

In the last post (which you can find here), we made the dough and the filling for this Southern wonder, a dried-fruit slab pie, inspired by Karen Barker's apricot rendition in the August/September issue of FINE COOKING.

Now we're putting it all together. It's not more than an assembly job. Get ready for pie!

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Christmas Slab Pie, Part 1

As you may know, we're fans of FINE COOKING magazine. One of the things I like most is that it calls me to my best cooking time and again.

Sometimes, it even calls me back to it. Until I saw a recipe for a slab pie in the magazine, I hadn't thought of this old-fashioned dessert since I was a kid in the South.

If you don't know, a slab pie is like a gigantic, baked turnover: a flaky butter crust, like a long thin envelope, sealing in a sweet fruit filling. You cut the pie into narrow strips. There's no pie tin or plate, so the crust gets extra-crunchy--so much so that those thin slices can be eaten out of the hand.

This summer, there was an apricot slab pie recipe in the August/September issue, in Karen Barker's fabulous article called "A Pie in the Hand," all about fried pies and other pie-ish delights that can be eaten without a fork in sight. (If you want to look at that article, click here.)

I dog-eared the page to try it--but never got around to it.

Until last week--when I wanted to make a dessert for the book group at the Norfolk Library. (If you want to know more about the book group I lead, click here.) We were reading Colum McCann's LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN, it was a dreary and cold day, and I thought about that slab pie. Apricots? No way. Not at this time of year. But maybe I could reinterpret it for the holidays.

And I did. (Hey, sometimes I not only write, I actually cook.)

Here's my version of Karen Barker's recipe. We're going to do this in two steps. This post is about getting the crust and the filling ready. The next (here) will be about putting it all together.

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Cranberry Buckle

Want to know a secret? I've been married four times. Three times to the same person. What am I, Elizabeth Taylor?

Bruce and I have had a commitment ceremony (1999), a legal civil union (2007), and now a legal marriage in Connecticut (2009).

OK, there's three. But before those, I was married, yep, in "the traditional way" to someone else. Without a lot of blathery confession, let's just say that it was a wonderful relationship with a great person. And in many ways a darn fine marriage: companionable and safe. As well as a part of my life I still cherish. In fact, a part that Bruce and I talk about all the time.

One of the best things about Bruce is this: he's not threatened by any of this stuff. I talk about my past and he doesn't blink. He accepts it--and assumes we'll always talk about things that may be painful, may not include him, and may be made up of great memories that happened long before him. Even relationship memories. If his grace is not the heart of redemption, I don't know what is.

So how does this all relate to buckle, that American coffee cake with a sugary topping so heavy, the cake buckles underneath it? Because my first spouse loved buckle. And I'd make it for her all the time, a breakfast treat for quiet, special mornings--or a dessert after a long day. (I was in grad school; she was working her way far up the corporate ladder.) I associate buckle with that marriage. And mostly feel warm and safe when I do.

Still, I haven't thought about buckle in years--until I ran across a recipe for Blueberry Buckle in The Ultimate Cook Book, our 900-recipe tome. I pointed it out to Bruce, told him about making it so many times before in a "previous life," told the story very nostalgically--and he asked me if I'd like him to make it for me as a treat this past weekend.

Isn't life nuts? It twists and turns into redemption with the most shocking abandon.

Anyway, he did. Except we had no blueberries. Instead, lots of cranberries. (We live in New England, after all.) Here's how to get eight servings of this terrific treat, with some real food morphs on the recipe:

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Buttermilk Blondies

It's hard to beat blondies. Cake + chocolate chips. Buttery. Not quite as dense as brownies. Better crumb. Did I mention chocolate?

They may also have been the first brownies. That sort of culinary trivia is hard to decipher, so many competing claims without proper documentation--but it appears that the "original" recipes for these bar cookies were for what we now call "blondies." Later, cocoa was added, then the chocolate was melted, and so came about the brownie.

No matter. It's a great American treat. Especially with buttermilk. And one little secret Bruce threw in.

Here come the blondies.

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Cocoa Brownies

If it's time to sift some flour and cocoa powder, it's time to make some of my favorite brownies!

Yes, good brownies usually require you to melt chocolate. But these are a little simpler: just cocoa, in fact. Yet they're dense, fudgy, and a little chewy. If you want them even fudgier, bake them a minute or two less, until a cake tester inserted into the brownie cake comes out with several moist crumbs attached.

Before we begin, two quick things. One: that darn sifting. Yes, it's important--to remove lumps from the flour and the cocoa. The brown lumps can be forced through the wire mesh, but leave any little bits of floury lumpiness in the sifter. We use a fine-mesh strainer for the task. Better still, the sifted flours make for a lighter cake and crumb. In other words, num num num.

Second: cocoa powder. As you know, there are two kinds--Dutch processed (with an alkali that helps it dissolve more quickly) and "natural" (without said alkali). This is not a fussy recipe. Either will work, although the natural kind will produce slightly chewier brownies.

Let's get to it. . . .

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Coffee Stout Gingerbread

Well, the gingerbread isn't stout. But it's made with stout.

I made this last week to take to my book group. Yep, I lead a book discussion group at the library in the town next to ours. It's a gorgeous, old-school library. And a gorgeous group, to boot. I've led book groups many times in my life (in Madison, in Austin)--and I believe this is the smartest, most convivial group I've seen in many a year. If you want to know about us, check it all out here.

Be that as it may, I always bring a treat to our discussions. This past week, I wanted to come up with the ultimate gingerbread. As you know, Bruce is the cook and I, the writer. But as you may also know, every once in a while I roll up my sleeves and come up with an original recipe.

Which always scares me. I'm not the one who went to chef school. I'm the keyboard guy. Anyway, I thought out this gingerbread recipe, made it, took it out of the oven only 30 minutes or so before the book group, brought it warm--and everyone fell upon it. No, I didn't have any sweetened whipped cream on the side (a hint, perhaps); but I brought my own thermos of coffee. Just because.

So here's the recipe, as well as some testing notes:

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Apple Crisp

Well, there it is, ready to go into the oven. Pretty fine, eh?

I promised some recipes that use the sugars I discussed in the last post. So here's one, a perfect dessert for a fall evening--or really anytime.

It's also made with walnut oil--which got used in the Apple Cake here. But any nut oil would work for the topping. You could even use melted butter. Wow.

This recipe has also been adapted from THE ULTIMATE COOK BOOK. There's a mix-and-match cobbler/crisp section in that book: seventeen fillings and ten toppings. Here's the apple version with an oaty, maply, nutty, crunchy topping--and with a less-refined sugar, to boot. (That said, I'll give you some "standard" substitutions as we go through the recipe.)

Honestly, I have to hold myself back from picking off that topping, leaving the fruit behind--and I love apples! You won't need any whipped cream or ice cream with this one--although I wouldn't stop you from putting a dollop or a scoop on mine if I come to dinner at your house.

Let's get to it.

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Apple Cake

Apples are in! (At least around us in New England.) They're appearing by the bushel and the peck, despite the drought we've experienced for the past several months.

Natch, it's time for Bruce's apple cake. I can't believe I haven't shared this recipe with you before. It's a staple in our house--even a great breakfast cake, as you'll see.

It's also an old recipe, one he got from his grandmother. In fact, the beat-up, stained recipe card calls it "Israeli Apple Cake." I don't know about the Israeli part (are there apples in Israel?), but I do know she used a tasteless oil for the batter. Blech. If we know anything about real food, we know there's no satiety there. So Bruce has morphed the recipe with walnut oil. Yum.

As you know, we're nuts about nut oils. But one warning: they don't move off the supermarket shelves quickly. If you get a bottle home and it smells rancid when opened, take it back for a full refund! Or consider buying nuts oils from sites like amazon.com. You can find the whole La Tourangelle collection there. Check this out for a three-can supply. Plus, it's lots cheaper than at the grocery store. And if you look up the six-can packs, it's even cheaper. Just make sure you store them in the fridge before and after opening--because all those omega-3s and polyunsaturated fats go whangy pretty fast at room temperature.

Enough with the blather. On to the cake. Did I mention it's a one-bowl wonder? Indeed.

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Brown Sugar Brownies

For us, the process of writing a cookbook involves finding the middle ground.

It's ever the dream, no? I once had a discussion once with a sommelier who told me that he tries to gauge the middle bottle of wine and then build the list out from there in both directions. (Unfortunately, he thought the middle bottle ran about $90US. Ah, well!) 

When Bruce and I write cookbooks, we also try to figure out that illusive middle. Which recipe stakes it out--and which then have the freedom to break it?

We believe the middle ground is made up of three things: taste, effort, and cost. To give you a little peak into the behind-the-scenes thinking in our latest book, REAL FOOD HAS CURVES, the seven-step plan to get off processed food, we staked out the middle ground with the oven-fried fish fillets, the ones included in the discussion about effort v. cost in our food choices, found in chapter 2, "Make Informed Choices."

We later included far easier and less costly recipes (like the no-cook peach salsa) and more difficult, challenging ones (like the Mapo Dofou--which you can also find on this blog here).

That process is perhaps nowhere more evident than in The Ultimate Brownie Book. So many people have their notion of brownies: there's the caky camp and the fudgy camp, for one thing. So we first sat down to try to find something that fell right in the middle, all other brownies moving out to the edges. And believe me, there some out on the edges. Like the caky brownies made with a can of Coca-Cola, a riff on my Cousin Wilma Faye's "co'-cola cake." (Yes, I had a cousin named Wilma Faye. Doesn't everybody?) Or like the fudgy Sour Cream Brownies. Crazy. Barely holding together in the pan. One minute less baking time and you could use them as an ice cream topping.

So here's the middle ground of brownies, a little bit cakey, a little bit fudgy, with only one kind of chocolate not three or four, certainly indulgent as a treat but not too much so, a little decadent but certainly not too much so.

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